The public prosecutors’ office in Wiener Neustadt, Lower Austria, said on Tuesday that it had received a complaint by the MKOe Mauthausen Committee against Tortendesign, a bakery in the village of Maria Enzersdorf near Vienna, for offering customers cakes decorated with swastikas or a baby raising its right hand in a Nazi salute.
While the cakes are not actually put on display in the shop window, a catalogue containing photographs of the designs is made freely available to customers, MKOe said in a statement.
The Nazi cakes, priced at around 90 euros (£79) apiece, were advertised in a separate “adult section” of the catalogue containing pictures of other “inappropriate” cake designs, such as penis-shaped marzipan sweets.
“This is a particularly abhorrent example of how money is made from Nazi filth. We’re going to file a criminal complaint,” said Willi Mernyi, the group’s chairman.
Pastry chef Manfred Klaschka told ORF public television: “If someone orders it, I make it. I don’t really think about it. I have to make a living.”
In a separate interview with Austrian newspaper, the Daily Oesterreich, Mr Klaschka insisted he was not a Nazi.
“If someone wanted a Gaddafi cake, I’d bake it for them,” he told the newspaper.
“This is exactly the sort of justification we heard all those decades ago. ‘I didn’t know anything, I didn’t see anything. That doesn’t concern me’,” said Mr Mernyi in response to Mr Klaschka’s comments.
Austria bans neo-Nazi activities and the public display of Nazi symbols, as well as attempts to glorify the Nazi era and deny the Holocaust.
I'm with the baker. People seriously need to get real. If someone wants to have swastikas on his cake, let him have it baked. What's everyone else's problem? It's just a cake FFS. Doesn't mean that everyone associated with it is a Nazi.